Bela was angered.
'You are ungrateful, you little child,' he said to his sister. 'Who loves us, who cares for us, who thinks of us, as our mother does? If her lips are cold, perhaps her heart is broken. We are only children; we can do so little.'
He had treasured the words of his father in his soul. He had never told them, except to Gela, but they were always present to him. He alone had seen and heard enough to understand that some dire disaster had shattered in pieces the beautiful life which his parents had led together. He had received an indelible impression from the two scenes of that evening. Without comprehending, he had felt that something had befallen them, which struck at their honour no less than at their peace. He had a clear conception of what honour was; it was the first tuition that Wanda von Szalras gave her children. Vague as his understanding of their grief had been, it had been sufficient to strike at that pride winch was inborn in him. He was like the Dauphin of whom he had thought in Paris. He had seen his father driven from his throne; he had seen his mother in the sackcloth and ashes of affliction. He was humiliated, bewildered, softened; he, who had believed himself omnipotent because all the people of the Iselthal ran to do his bidding, felt how helpless he was in truth. He was shut out from his mother's confidence; he had been powerless to console her or to retain his father; there was something even in himself from which his mother shrank. What had his father said? 'She will in time pardon you for being mine.' What had been the meaning of those strange words? And where had his father gone?
When the summer came and Bela rode through the glad green woods, his heart was heavy. Would his father never ride there any more? Bela had often watched, himself unseen, the fiery horse that bore the man he loved come plunging and leaping through bough and brake till it passed him as though the wind bore it. He had always thought as he had watched, 'When I grow up I will be just what he is'; and now that splendid and gracious figure which had been always present on the horizon of his child's mind, magnified and glorified like the illuminated figures in the painted chronicles, was no more there—had faded utterly away in the dusk and the snow of that wintry twilight.
A thousand times was the question to his mother on his lips: 'Will he never come back? Shall we never see him again?' But he dared not speak it when he saw that look of a revulsion they could not comprehend always upon her face.
'He bade me never vex her,' Bela thought, and obeyed.
'I wonder if ever he think of us,' he said once to Gela, as their ponies walked down one of the grassy rides of the home woods.
'Perhaps he is dead,' said Gela, in a hushed, wistful voice.
'How dare you say that, Gela?' said his brother, angry from an intolerable pain. 'If he were—were—that, we should be told it. There would be masses in the chapel. We should have black clothes. Oh no! he is not dead. I should know it, I am sure I should know it. He would send down some angel to tell me.'
'Why do you care so much for him?' said Gela, very low. 'It must be he who has made our mother so changed, so unhappy; and it is she whom we should love most. You say even he told you so.'